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What you call milquetoast false-centrism, I'd call regular centrism. I know Corona is your hobbyhorse, but the FDP was if anything overly critical compared to the center (which suits me, since I also was on the critical side).
On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren. Privately, I've argued multiple times that the AFD has a point, and that as long as the german political establishment is unwilling to tackle the dysfunctional, barely existent border and immigration politics, they will only get stronger. This is reasonably close to the stated position of the FDP, though I suspect that being libertarians they're more in favor of open borders than I'd like, but unfortunately we don't have a topic-based voting law.
By false-centrism, I mean that taking the middle ground between an utterly unreasonable position and a reasonable position is not, in itself, inherently reasonable or centrist. For instance, the centrist position on self-nuking is the same as the ardent anti self-nuking position, not that you should compromise by only nuking yourself with half the number of bombs. Similarly, the centrist position on lockdowns isn't that you should do 'kind' lockdowns, or short lockdowns, but instead that there should be no lockdowns, the same position as was held by all German political parties until 2020. The FDPs position on the coronavirus response is still extreme, even if it's not as extreme as the SDP.
I find myself questioning further why the FDP tolerates being in it's current coalition. Still, I prefer to look at what a party actually does as opposed to what it says, and being in a coalition government that is carrying out political repression is more important than their statements against that repression.
My read is that the leadership in general and Lindner in particular seem to have been burned by the "better not to rule at all than to rule badly" policy based on which they rejected forming the Jamaica coalition in the previous elections. And it is my impression that they have, in the past few years, run on a largely practical and non-ideological platform. As a member I receive the party newspaper, and it's full of equating liberalism with whatever the hell is currently expedient. Apparently liberalism is anything from feminism to subsidies, so long as the results are good enough. In other words, I think the FDP of the past few years just tried its damndest to be able to say "look, while the others are willing to ruin the country for the sake of ideology, we're just trying to keep everything working!". As a rabid ideologue, I'll accuse the party of having been far too reasonable and conciliatory throughout this term, because lo and behold, most voters do not appreciate reasonable, milquetoast and modestly productive policy. They either hate the FDP for being the enemy, or hate it for not waging the culture war.
Few are the Germans who just want a little less public debt, a little lower taxes, and a little less bureaucracy. And yet the party soldiers on, and tries to do what little good it can. It almost feels like it's out of some sense of civic duty, though cynicism won't allow the thought.
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The coalition is not actually doing anything yet, though. Even the SPD lead is rather mealy-mouthed: "we can't entirely rule out a Verbotsverfahren as a last stop, maybe". People are certainly complaining a lot about the AFD, which is legal. Funny enough I've heard the same criticism from the left in person - the SPD hasn't actually done anything against the AFD yet, and Scholz has mentioned deportation favorably in the past, therefore they secretly agree! I find that silly, to be clear.
More questionable is that AFD-members are being kicked out of some smaller organisations, which I'm mostly against, but this has little to do with the FDP, and is difficult to legally control without throwing out freedom of association in general.
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